Ariel Rin and Third Party Development for CSM19

Council Of Stellar Management CSM Campaigns
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Why

CCP have been snuffing out some of the most passionate and engaged members of the EVE Community. In the last four years we’ve seen neglect evolve into unreliability, undocumented changes, year long outages, gaslighting and bans.

Third Party Tools have long been a driving force behind the success of CCP and EVE Online, members of our community working for free are a force multiplier on CCP development resources and have repeatedly resulted in some groundbreaking and unique tools unique to EVE.

CCP and Third Party Developers used to have a mutual goal of designing safe and effective tools, and It’s been my constant struggle to reignite that professional relationship for the benefit of all players.

I’m Ariel Rin, Third Party Developer, The current Maintainer of the Alliance Auth Project, and I’m running for CSM to bring ESI development back to a reliable, safe and game design approved state. In order to continue to push the envelope on community and social engagement in EVE.

I’ve spent the last three years as an EVE Partner with open arms attempting to bridge this gap with CCP, and while some amazing CCP devs have done their best, on the whole the experience has been heavily weighted against Third Party Developers with little to no interaction outside the Community Team. While i dont feel like my time as a partner was wasted, I think i’ve acheived all we can for Third Party Developers from this angle. More representation and a louder voice is needed, the CSM.

How

I am a realist, Getting CCP to allocate a developer to ESI again is a big ask, time and resources dont come cheap. But I see immense value in the passionate engaged Third Party Developer community as a force multiplier. If i can advocate for CCP to give us an inch to let us deliver a Mile, time after time we can make serious progress.

Advise on prioritising the 450+ untouched ESI/SSO tickets, this is likely intimidating to anyone coming afresh into the ESI role at CCP, but less than a dozen of them are severe pain points driving Third Party Developers and their Apps away from EVE.

Reinforce how the social engagement enabled by ESI is core to the longevity and passion of the EVE community. When ESI goes down and people lose access to Discord, Mumble, Teamspeak or Jabber, people are severed from EVE not just as players but as a community.

Push to re-open communication, the ESI team havent communicated a change or outage to us that wasnt reported by a popular app or discord becoming inaccessible, in almost three years. This really shouldn’t be rocket science and professional curtesy goes a long way. Most developers are chomping at the bit to help improve ESI, if there is something we can do to help, be it to reduce load on the server or move to another endpoint. Let us!

Remind CCP that every single ESI request should be tagged with our Email address, you dont need to ban us to discover who we are.

Work with the community and CCP Support to re-establish procedures around ESI reporting. A Support Ticket shouldn’t fall into a black hole because they send you to a dead Slack server (o7 the people that still use it), We have a Discord, We have Githubs, but after such a period of neglect these fall from the mind.

Continue to advocate against the narrative being pushed by factions of CCP that ESI is rogue, evil, unnapproved by game design, untrustwothy and bad for the game.

To the great numbers of CCP Developers that do care and put yourselves on the line championing for us day in, day out. I hope this campaign reminds you that you aren’t alone and passionate Third Party Developers are still here and would love to work with you again.

My Vaguely Timeline-Esque Story

While I am primarily running on a Third Party Development platform, I’ve been around a while and developed connections and relationships in a wide variety of eve niche’s and mechanics.

  • Currently the Lead Maintainer of the Alliance Auth project with a dozen developers contributing to a fully open source EVE Authentication and tooling platform
  • Developer of AA Community Apps Market Manager, Relays, Alumni, Incursions, Drifters; contributor to Discord Bot, Corp Tools and more.
  • Built EVEMeet, for organizing out of game events. This was shut down because of COVID
  • EVE Partner for my current work on Alliance Auth and previously EVEMeet
  • Nullbrain line Member in The Initiative [INIT.]
  • Simple Farmers [FARMD] fanboy, taught me everything I know about gate camping and how to lose a super
  • Rekking Crew super hunting
  • Delve Dunks, a 10 person crew dropping dreadbombs in Delve trading 94 Dreads for 2.2T of 69 Supers (and more)
  • IT Admin and helped run Tactical Supremacy [TIKLE] an AUTZ Alliance focused solely on AUTZ players and AUTZ content creation. Early pioneers of fozzie-sov warfare and citadel mechanics. A founding member of StainFraggin, later Legacy Coalition
  • Highsec Incursions TLA#1 https://tlaincursions.com/, Level 4 Facwar missions, Level 5 Lowsec missions, C5 Magnetar’s in dreads, if you can make ISK I’ve tried it.
  • Pandemic Legion (RIP), RKK before they tried to awox me and SNIGG after that
  • Dustbunny <3 Dust 514

And before all of that, I rented in drone lands, from either Solar Fleet, XIX or whoever was “winning” at the time.

Git

For more information about the Alliance Auth project and the dedicated developer team

My projects

WIP/Betas

Socials

Discord: arielrin
Twitter Github GitLab

AUTZ GMT+10

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Expanding on the widespread issues with ESI

The non-exhaustive list of problems with ESI

  • 2018-05-18 - Chat Channels removed from ESI, while its rebuilt for new chat servers. Not Restored.
  • 2019-11-25 - “Temporary Blackout Of ESI Bookmarks”, still not restored
  • 2020-12-16 - Removal of Character Stats (those cool year in review videos!)
  • 2021-10 - Bulk character affiliation updates now fail on a single biomassed character, without details. Requiring 500 (vs 1) ESI calls.
  • 2021-11-01 - SSOv1 Deprecation Timeline, effort was put into moving to V2 at CCPs request. V1 is still active…
  • 2022-03-29 - CCP modified the JWT validation of tokens, breaking all apps and requiring rushed fixes. Not communicated, Developers were blamed for following CCPs documentation.
  • 2022-04-29 <> 2022-07-11 Corporation and Character Assets and Contracts offline.
  • 2022-07-12 - Unauthenticated Search taken offline. Will not be restored. (this is fair)
  • 2022-09-26 - ESI Tokens not being revoked upon character sale/transfer. No response from security@ccpgames, fix took a month.
  • 2022-11-04 <> 2023-05-09 - Market History taken offline, This endpoint has returned with undocumented rate limiting, leading to many developers still being banned for not respecting limits they dont know exist.
  • 2023-01-09 - Character Corporation History taken offline, still not restored.
  • 2023-01-24 - CCP begins banning people using ESI Contracts, Bans continue to be applied.
  • 2023-05-18 - Developers are blamed for using the old image server, while CCPs own websites and launcher continues to use it

CCP have very nicely asked us to add User-Agent headers with our email addresses, yet strip this information from ESI requests, and cant/wont use them to contact us for issues. Because of this, they are continually banning some of the most popular community apps and Auth platforms for major alliances without even bothering to reach out to resolve the issues

415 Open ESI Issues, 243 of which are untouched for Four Years
47 Open SSO Issues. 35 of which are also untouched for Four Year
security@ccpgames.com email address is unresponsive to critical security issues

FAQ:

Q: Third Party Apps are evil, they are cheating

A: Every feature currently in ESI was approved by Game Design, but if CCP choose to change this, I would support it. Part of maintaining an API is removing features deemed unsafe or too powerful.

I do place a great deal of value in things that are currently available in the game client, and I think not providing them via an API encourages client cache and memory scraping, tools that we used to rely on in a grey area and one of the primary reasons CCP developed ESI, to legitimize approved methods of data access.

Q: I hate killboards, CCP should stop or delay them

A: So, what does this mean for ingame killmails, should killmails just not exist? Be private and remove the Corp being able to see it?

I don’t think so, and ESI is just an approved and safe way to access the data already visible to you.

Q: Having to run a server and have an IT admin for a video game sucks

A: I Agree! While I’ve put a lot of work into making it as easy as possible for players to run their own tools, the amount of time we can dedicate to making this seamless and user friendly is limited by the time we spend under attack by CCP.

Q: ESI puts too much power into the big blocs

A: In my experience as a developer for large and small entities, this isn’t so. Big Blocs have large masses of humanpower to throw at problems like HR, authentication and social access. Small groups have to spend time that could be spent creating content on these issues instead.
Automated tooling levels the playing field for everyone and frees people up to play a video game

Q: What value does ESI bring to EVE and why should CCP care

A: I mentioned that ESI is a force multiplier for CCP developer effort, what I mean by this is for every hour CCP spend on a feature, the Third Party Development community spends hundreds, building and maintaining better tools than ccp could hope to build in their time spent.

Q: What about the Excel Addon

A: An interesting point, the Excel addon is powered by ESI in the backend, as near as I can tell the delays and problems with releasing this was around the massive outstanding issues with ESI, a healthier ESI allows not only Third Party Developers to develop features, but CCP as well.

Also a shoutout to GESI that already exists for Google Sheets, built by a Third Party Developer and is awesome.

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Thread posted in a hurry, ill be back in a few hours to update.

#work stuff

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Make ESI Great Again!

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You have my vote !

Make ESI Great Again!

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how do i vote for you, i use and love AA

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Should be just 19 calls with a binary search implementation, assuming only 1 character from the 500 is biomassed, and not much more if more. :sweat_smile:

Good luck with your candidature! Your work is appreciated.

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You’ll have my vote!

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I’m pretty sure we avoided doing this due to error limits

That said, I’m going to check again, Assuming makes an Ass out of U and Me

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My vote as well!

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You definitely have my vote!

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Hi Ariel, curious questions ahead

First and foremost, since you run the AA project, what information do you glean from other alliances and corps that deign to use your software? How actually secure is it and are you able to get other users information with it? Before you ask, no I’m not a coder… I barely can work with my arduino, so looking at your code would be a fruitless endeavor for me. In addition, I am not accusing you of being able to see any other alliance info,

Second, how would you help in other aspects of EVE outside of this backend, having a specialization is nice, but being able to have ideas and work with the rest of CSM to have good input on other issues.

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I have known Ariel for the better part of 10+ years. He is passionate, dedicated and deeply ingrained into the EVE Community both from behind the keyboard and behind the pint. Most of the in-game stuff that he has done, I have been there with him.

I’ll sub to vote for him because ESI is just one aspect of the game that he understands, he also brings so much more to the table than just his Partner contributions.

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We develop AA, but its freely available to anyone to use, this means we dont touch their Servers or Data, enabling independance is one of our primary motivators.

We do have an opt-out data collection thats very transparently documented
Analytics FAQ — Alliance Auth documentation. We use this to help development, and to champion the value of ESI with CCP.

  • A non-identifiable record of the server’s existence
  • Number of Users
  • Number of Characters
  • Number of ESI Tokens
  • Installed App Names
  • Alliance Auth Version

I’ve listed out a bit of my history, I’ve touched on a lot of EVE, I absolutely, really dont want to walk into a conversation and proclaim I know everything about wormholes, but I’ve atleast lived in one, I’ve fought for one (I’ve made lots of money in one XD). So I can take on board the discussion, form my own conclusions and add my small voice, or step back and simply know when i wont be adding value.

I’m a compulsive “solver” in EVE, when I hear theres a new way to rat with Thunderchilds in EVE, i go out and scavenge every piece of information I can find, test fits, methods and strategies and write detailed wiki articles on it. This again means, I’ve used and abused most content in the game, if only to make ISK, but really just for the joy of solving it.

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a +1 here…

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Thank you for the prompt and detailed reply, I much appreciate it.

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My name is Tanthalas Solostaran and this is my favourite CSM application on Tranquility.

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+1 from me!

Ariel is one of the most passionate and successful EVE 3rd party developers.
An obvious vote to anyone that sees any value in any of the tools or websites out there!

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I too would like to add my +1 for Ariel Rin. ESI really needs a bit more love from CCP, which consequently translates into respect for the Third Party Dev community, which created (and still creates) a LOT of fantastic tools and toys for everyone to make their EVE online experience better and unlike any other game out there…and all on their free time.

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You have my vote!

@Ariel_Rin cares about people

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